The present invention relates generally to surgical occlusion instruments and, more particularly, to surgical staplers.
Surgical staplers are used to approximate or clamp tissue and to staple the clamped tissue together. As such, surgical staplers have mechanisms to ensure that tissue is properly positioned and captured prior to driving staples through the tissue. This partly entails that the clamped tissue together is compressed or squeezed to ensure that the width of the clamped tissue is not too large so as to prevent the staples from forming against the anvil of the stapler as well as not too narrow as to eliminate capillary function in the clamped tissue. Mechanisms have also been provided to ensure that staples are loaded in the stapler prior to clamping the tissue.
As a result, this has produced, for example, multiple triggers and handles in conjunction with complex mechanism to provide proper stapling of the clamped tissue. With these complex mechanism, these mechanism increase manufacturing burdens, introduces potential sources for device failure and confusion for the user. Thus, reliable stapling of clamped tissue without complex mechanisms is desired.